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 | The Greatest Mathematicians of All Time |
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The Greatest Mathematicians of All Time
ranked in approximate order of "greatness."
To qualify, the mathematician must be born before 1930 and his work must have
breadth, depth, and historical importance.
There are two Chinese are in top 100
. 63 Liu Hui
Liu Hui made major improvements to Chang's influential textbook Nine Chapters, making him among the most important of Chinese mathematicians ever. (He seems to have been a much better mathematician than Chang, but just as Newton might have gotten nowhere without Kepler, Vieta, Huygens, Fermat, Wallis, Cavalieri, etc., so Liu Hui might have achieved little had Chang not preserved the ancient Chinese learnings.) Among Liu's achievements are an emphasis on generalizations and proofs, an early recognition of the notions of infinitesimals and limits, the Gaussian elimination method of solving simultaneous linear equations, calculations of solid volumes (including the use of Cavalieri's Principle), anticipation of Horner's Method, and a new method to calculate square roots. Like Archimedes, Liu discovered the formula for a circle's area; however he failed to calculate a sphere's volume, writing "Let us leave this problem to whoever can tell the truth."
84 Shiing-Shen Chern
Shiing-Shen Chern (Chen Xingshen) studied under Élie Cartan, and became perhaps the greatest master of differential geometry. He is especially noted for his work in algebraic geometry, topology and fiber bundles, developing his Chern characters (in a paper with "a tremendous number of geometrical jewels"), developing Chern-Weil theory, the Chern-Simons invariants, and especially for his brilliant generalization of the Gauss-Bonnet Theorem to multiple dimensions. His work had a major influence in several fields of modern mathematics as well as gauge theories of physics. Chern was an important influence in China and a highly renowned and successful teacher: one of his students (Yau) won the Fields Medal, another (Yang) the Nobel Prize in physics. Chern himself was the first Asian to win the prestigious Wolf Prize.
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